Asylum

Book Details

Library

Author

Patrick McGrath

Category

Drama

Editor

Reference #

Contributor

Location

Translator

Status

Publisher

Penguin Books Ltd

Owner

Country

England

Personal

Language

Read it

Yes

Year Published

1996

Date Read

23/01/2006

ISBN

0670870013

Personal Rating

 6/10

LCCN

Purchase

Edition

Purchase Date

Printing

Acquired from 

Marlborough Library

Binding

Hardcover

Price

$0.00

Pages

250

Value

$0.00

Overview

As a psychiatrist in a top-security mental hospital in the 1950's, Peter Cleave has made a study of what he calls 'the catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession'. He understands how such love affairs begin, and the stages they must pass through. His experience is extensive and he is never surprised. Until, that is, he comes reluctantly to accept that the wife of one of his colleagues has embarked on just such an affair. For this, Peter Cleave is not prepared.

Yet how could any man be adequately prepared for Stella Raphael? It is not so much that Stella is a woman of extraordinary beauty and formidable intelligence, nor that - as the wife of the hospital's new deputy superintendent - she is in a position of symbolic power. Rather, it is Stella's attraction Edgar Stark that unsettles Cleave's institutional certainty. For Edgar Stark is not one of Cleave's colleagues but one of his patients - an artist, a sculptor convicted and committed for an unspeakably brutal crime.

To possess Edgar, to enable him to posses her, Stella embarks on a brazen adventure. And as her husband and son struggle to accept her desertion, Cleave fights to save Stella from the vagaries of her own increasingly eruptive pathology, and from Edgar Stark. But the course she has chosen soon gathers a tragic momentum it seems can end only in some variation on ruin.

Review

Set during the 1950's, this book is told from Stella's point of view, through the doctor, tracing her descent from doctor's wife to slut to mental patient.

The story itself is intriguing, especially with the doctor hinting at what was to come. Stella's 'madness' is treated by relating every detail of the whole episode, but bits of it seem contrived, as though she's telling the doctor what she thinks he wants to hear, even before the slowly-approached climax.

The doctor himself plays more than just a sideline part, and he left me feeling uneasy. The ending didn't surprise me, and the moral of the story seems to be that everyone is a little bit mad.